The present invention relates to computer and network security, and more particularly, a system and method for securely transmitting, searching, and storing data.
Advances in computer and communications technology have increased a free flow of information within networked computer systems. While a boon to many, such free flow of information can be disastrous to those systems which process sensitive data. In a typical networked computer system, one or more clients are connected over a communication network to a server.
The risk of a security breach is compounded when a pathway is provided from a private network to a public network such as the Internet. The Internet is a loose conglomeration of networks connected to a standard network protocol. One of the benefits of accessing the Internet is that the vast amounts of information can be accessed by the user. However, of such unobstructed access, the danger is that there are little or virtually no controls on what individuals can access and what they may do with such access. When data is stored or transmitted which allows parties, to access such data even though they are not authorized to access it, it is necessary to take steps to insure the security of that stored data and to ensure the integrity of data transmitted from one computer to another (e.g., via the Internet).
A number of measures, e.g. encryption procedures, have been used to reduce the vulnerability of the networked systems to unauthorized access. Conventional encryption procedures encode data to prevent the unauthorized access, especially during the transmission of the data. Encryption procedure is generally based on one or more keys, or codes, which are essential for decoding, or reverting the data into a readable form.
The traditional encryption techniques focus on the security of the transmission and ignore the security of storage. These techniques provide a protection against the first kind of attacks which include intercepting the data as it is being transmitted. The encryption techniques not only allow the authentication of the sender of a message, but also serve to verify the integrity of the message itself, thus proving that the message has not been altered during the transmission. Such techniques include the use of both symmetric and asymmetric keys, as well as digital signatures and hash algorithms.
The encryption algorithms or procedures are generally characterized in two categories: symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric algorithms use one key to encrypt and decrypt a message. An encryption key is a sequence of bits that can be used to encode or decode a message. These symmetric algorithms require that both the sender and the intended receiver of the message (and no one else) know the same key. On the other hand, asymmetric algorithms use two separate keys e.g., a public and a private key to encrypt and/or decrypt a message. The public keys are published, (i.e., in the sense that the public key is available from a particular service; such as a telephone directory) so that everyone knows everyone else""s public key. The private keys, on the other hand, are kept secret by the owner.
Thus, in a situation where, for example, a patient wanted to send an encrypted message to his or her doctor, the patient would use the doctor""s public key to encrypt the message, and then send the encrypted message to the doctor. The doctor would then use his private key to decrypt the message.
The practice of using encryption protocols or procedures to authenticate message senders as well as the integrity of messages is well known in the art (see e.g., Bruce Schneier, Applied Cryptography, Protocols, Algorithms, And Source Code In C, 2d ed., John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1996).
Conventional systems and methods suffer from, e.g., at least four deficiencies:
1. Restricted media and time: data management security measures only apply to data transmission, thus exposing stored data to an unauthorized access or unauthorized data manipulation;
2. Exceeded user generality: data management security measures ignore interaction patterns between individuals or user groups;
3. Exceeded application scope: security measures ignore specific requirements of particular applications (e.g., medical use); and
4. Exceeded implementation demands: security measures require nxe2x88x921 keys for a group of n people. (as discussed in the publication by Schneier listed above).
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method which elevates the security standards across all digital media and prevents compromising data (e.g., patient data) in case of an authorized access of the server. Moreover, there is a need for a system and method that combines security and privacy protection without impeding data processing performance or conventional query scope in a relational database.
The present invention is directed to a method and system that satisfies the need of securely transmitting, searching, and storing data. Such a system and method allows a user to transfer data securely to a private network by pre-encrypting sensitive data with an encryption key, encrypting both non-sensitive data and the pre-encrypted data with a different encryption key and sending this encrypted data to a private network.
In an embodiment of the system and method, a server is configured to perform fuzzy searching. The procedure for fuzzy searching include creating trigrams for each record in a record database, sorting the trigrams alphabetically, computing signature vectors for each record in the record database, encrypting the signature vectors with an encryption key, and storing the encrypted signature vectors in an encrypted signature database. In addition, the above steps are performed to obtain an encrypted signature vector for a search query. Thereafter, the closest encrypted signature vector is obtained from an encrypted vector database (i.e., the encrypted signature vector that is closest to the search query encrypted signature vector is obtained).
According to another embodiment of the present invention, the record database which contains both non-sensitive data and encrypted sensitive data is searched. This is accomplished by encrypting the search query with an encryption key. Then, one or more records satisfying the search query are found.
Another embodiment of the present invention allows authorized users access to the encrypted sensitive data. First, the database which contains information is checked to determine which users are authorized to access certain data, and if the user is authorized to access such data, then the user is allowed to access a master encryption key. With the master encryption key, a further encryption key is decrypted. This further encryption key provides access for the user to the sensitive data.